Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Spotted links

Reconstructing Mayakovsky"Set in the future, Reconstructing Mayakovsky revisits the past to make sense of the chaotic present. Inspired by Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Russian Futurist poet who killed himself in 1930 at the age of thirty-six, the novel imagines a dystopia where uncertainty and tragedy have finally been eliminated through technology. Like the novel, the website uses “found“ objects (image, sound, text) and combines elements of historical fiction, science fiction, poetry, and the detective novel, to tell the story of Mayakovsky in a radically different way."

Dalkey AnnualThe summer Review of Contemporary Fiction is "the second Dalkey Archive Annual ... featuring work from books forthcoming over the next four seasons". Online content includes reviews of Bolaño, Kertész and "Three Contemporary German-Language Fiction Writers".

Abdelwahab MeddebCharlotte Mandell offers excerpts from Tomb of Ibn Arabi, a forthcoming book of translations of prose poems by Abdelwahab Meddeb, described elsewhere as "one of North Africa's most important contemporary thinkers".

"Blanchot l'extrême"Philippe Sollers reviews Blanchot's Ecrits politiques 1953-1993. I've little idea what he says as it's in French. However, it does reveal that, in the wake of the fatwa, Blanchot offered his house as a meeting point for Salman Rushdie and Khomeini's successor; with himself as mediator!